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Just as an aside: life on earth is about 4 billion years old, the universe is roughly four times older. This means that panspermia increases the time evolution had to work with by less than an order of magnitude. Which is why I found panspermia never that interesting.

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I understand your perspective, but to give panspermia it's due, the time it has to work its magic should be multiplied by the number of planets hospitable to some form of evolving life, which is certainly in the billions at least. Of course what percent of those would send out interplanetary "seeds" that could have reached us billions of years ago, that's pure speculation.

For my own part I am growing increasingly convinced that the well-calibrated "tuning parameters" we see are exactly that, and we are in some kind of rich simulation that has been rebooted and forked and side patched and merged and mutated with whatever "coding" technologies the simulation creators have invented in their parent universe.

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